Love Letters

To: New York. From: Nicolas Ghesquière. First Seen On The Runway At Jfk Airport’s Twa Flight Center, Louis Vuitton’s Cruise’20 Collection Embodies The Bright Lights And Big City From Its Embroidery To The Seams. At The Re-staging Of The Season’s Runway In Seoul, Actress Rebecca Lim Takes On The Empire State Of Mind

- Andrea Sim

Locations are paramount to Louis Vuitton. It is a house so steeped in the notion of travel — given its founding offering of luggages — that it’s almost written in the stars that its destinations rival the spectacle of new season clothing being presented. That, and the tendency for Cruise to read like a whistle-stop tour of exotic locales and architectural wonders, has seen Nicolas Ghesquière transport his audience to landmarks so monumental they’ll long outlive any of the Instagram snaps they incite.

Giving Cruise 2018’s Miho Museum, situated partly within a mountain in Kyoto, and 2017’s Niterói Contemporary Art Museum, a giant disc-like structure overlooking the Atlantic in Rio a fair fight, is Cruise 2020’s touchdown at the John F. Kennedy airport’s TWA Flight Center. The collection was also recently re-staged in Seoul, but its original show location, the now-defunct futurist airport terminal (that’s currently the newly minted TWA hotel) designed by Eero Saarinen in 1962 is marked by its cavernous ceilings and eccentrically curved stairways and structures, easily warping one’s sense of time upon arrival. Ghesquière said, “I was lucky enough to have landed at the TWA Flight Center in the late ‘90s. It was something I could never forget.” It is, too, an architectural baby born of the Jet Age — a bookmark in time of the liftoff of air travel — and, an exceptionally fitting calling card for Ghesquière’s time-travelling tendencies as a designer.